Saturday Review

Morgan at the House of Eratosthenes notes:

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The debate over immigration is over: restriction wins.

The debate over borders is over: they are needed.

The debate over globalization is over: the era of autarky begins.

The debate over Europe is over: it is a geographic expression, not a polity.

The debate over global warming is over: it is irrelevant.

The debate over international institutions is over: only nations matter.

The debate over the People’s Republic of China is over: it is a menace to the community of nations, not a member in good standing.

Crisis is clarity.

People forget that the Chinese tried to poison the world’s pets a few years back. In 2007, many brands of cat and dog foods had to be recalled due to contamination with melamine. The Chinese also poisoned our toothpaste with toxic chemicals.
I favour the approach of the people in Hong Kong, with their lives on the front line, who have been expressing their views undiplomatically. One Hong Kong demonstrator provided to a television camera, when asked for his advice to Mr Donald Trump: “Don’t trust China. China is asshole.”
The reason to open the economy is it will save more lives than it will cost. The alternative to relaxing the quarantine and allowing the virus to run its course is to remain locked down until there is a vaccine or cure. That is flat out insane. How can American look herself in the mirror and call herself the land of the free without NCAA football this fall?
Argumentum ad Trumpum – What intrigued me was the assumption on the part of the person who said, “He’s playing Trump’s game,” that this was in itself a sufficient refutation of what Lévy wrote. This is the more recent incarnation of the argumentum ad Hitlerum, that if an opinion can in some way be made to resemble Hitler’s ideas, if only by taking it to its logical conclusion, then no further refutation of it is necessary. It stands refuted.

The older I get
The fewer friends I have
But you don’t need a lot when the ones that you got
Have always got your back
And the older I get
The better I am
At knowing when to give
And when to just not give a damn

HT: Krill

There are useful idiots and narcopaths out there that thrive in these types of unstable environments. They too are vampires seeking to bleed people dry while using the disaster as cover. These are the people screaming at strangers walking down the street that they need to “go back home” and “flatten the curve”. These are the people calling the cops on their neighbors for talking in a group bigger than two or three.
Sheeple are people that have no capacity for self leadership. They just want to feel protected and secure no matter what, even if they have to sacrifice their freedoms in exchange for that feeling. They are a prime target for The Collectivists and The Global Elites.
Everybody Now Dies Of Coronavirus – Another result of juicing the numbers is that the pols will be able to use them to prolong their control. Nobody will remember the juicing; it’s probably already forgotten even though only two days old.
As of April 8, two of American Airlines’ 28,000 flight attendants were said to have died of COVID-19. By way of comparison, at least 59 of the 71,000 employees of New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs subways, buses, and commuter rails, have died of coronavirus as of April 14.
I notice that the same people telling Americans they must remain at home indefinitely were indignant about closing bathhouses in response to the AIDS epidemic. Back then, the media and all gays except Randy Shilts said: How dare you ask us to shut down the bathhouses! They’re part of gay culture. It would be like asking Catholics to stop visiting the Sistine Chapel! But putting the entire country under stay-at-home orders? No problem.
If there is to be just one line to describe the history of white people on this planet, it should be “No good deed goes unpunished.” White people literally pulled the world out of the dark ages, but the world remains an ungrateful place. Asians in America are now working on their grievance tales, about how the round-eye was mean to them during the great yellow pandemic of 2020. The fact that they would be eating bugs and living in huts if not for the white man is conveniently forgotten.
Some Things Will Never Be the Same After the Chinese Coronavirus The Climate Hoaxers: Hey, the science people can’t generate a model that correctly predicts tomorrow, but we should totally go for a re-do times a hundred of the current economic chaos because some freaky Nordic waif demands we obey models that purport to give us the weather report for the year 2120. Pass.

‘Don’t hop on the long chariot’ The ‘long chariot’ is the world of policy, or politics, where we are endlessly trying to fix the chariot: to keep it moving or get it moving again. But the world doesn’t work on policy. In the broadest sense, it works on prayer; if I may define prayer so broadly that it includes ancestor worship. Its principles are those of celestial mechanics. It doesn’t go anywhere. Rather, it turns.
Perhaps nothing will prove more difficult to salvage from the train wreck than individual rights, the fundamental building block of subsidiarity, which are being eroded at an unprecedented rate. The need to track the whereabouts of literally every citizen in the name of “contact tracing” the public means government will demand to know exactly where you’ve been and who you’ve ever met with.
As I said on Tuesday, anything under 100 thousand is a blown forecast. They cannot claim “social distancing worked even better than we thought!”No. The low ball 100 thou was with “social distancing”. If under 100K, it’s a blown model.
The media will have to be coached carefully so they don’t screw up and accidentally report the truth. A whole new gaggle of experts and actors playing experts is being prepped to explain why it is now okay to go outside. At the same time, they still have to blame Orange Man for the deaths that never materialized.
They’ll Snuff Your Life to End Their “Stigma” As it was with AIDS, so it is with COVID. Members of identity groups (and their “allies”) putting “offense” before public health…selfish advocates and activists who place their hurt feelings above public safety, who fret endlessly that the name of a disease might “stigmatize” a particular identity group, and who vigorously defend the in-group actions (anal sex, eating exotic wildlife) that cause and spread a particular disease.
NYT should visit New York City Manhattan will be like it was in the 1970s again, only there is no young Donald John Trump on the horizon to reverse the fleeing, and there is no Rudy Giuliani to fight the crime.
San Francisco Responds to Covid-19 With an Experiment in Lawlessness In the Tenderloin, SOMA, and Mid-Market neighborhoods, the homeless congregate in open-air drug markets; dealers wear gloves and masks and sell heroin, fentanyl, and methamphetamine in broad daylight.
Possible Chinese Nuclear Testing Stirs U.S. Concern –